This report grew out of an effort by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE's) Center on Continual Instructional Improvement (CCII) to extend its evaluation of the usefulness of the concept of "Learning Progressions" for the fields of mathematics and science education, to include literacy teaching and learning. Herein,…

The PISA for Development (PISA-D) project aims to make PISA more accessible and relevant to middle- and low-income countries by introducing new features to the assessment, including tests that are specially designed to measure lower levels of performance, contextual questionnaires that better reflect the situations of 15-year-olds across a diverse…

In generalizability theory studies in large-scale testing contexts, sometimes a facet is very sparsely crossed with the object of measurement. For example, when assessments are scored by human raters, it may not be practical to have every rater score all students. Sometimes the scoring is systematically designed such that the raters are…

With recent developments in technology, online tests and digital tools offer school psychologists and school counsellors alternate modes of assessment. These new technologies have the potential to increase accessibility to tests (through greater portability), allow school psychologists and school counsellors to service more students (through…

Informed by Goffman's influential essay on "The neglected situation" this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman's participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and…

This article is a state-of-the-art synthesis of literature concerned with the concept of Numeracy (also known internationally by other terms such as mathematical literacy), and the teaching, learning and assessment practices associated with this construct. Numeracy is a concept used to identify the knowledge and capabilities required to…

Institutional cultures of assessment are praised as beneficial to student learning. Yet, extant studies have not explored the theoretical foundations and pragmatic approaches to shaping cultures of assessment. The researchers used the Delphi method to explore 10 higher education assessment leaders' attitudes and theoretical perspectives regarding…

A grand challenge is a problem that requires broad cooperation for successful resolution from a community of scholars. Several national and international organizations have generated lists of grand challenges to unify the efforts of scholars and practitioners in a field. However, the field of assessment has yet to identify its own set of grand…

Schools face enormous challenges regarding how to operate efficiently and safely for the 2020-21 school year. As part of that response, some state leaders are asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive the annual federal testing and accountability requirements for 2021, which are key to understanding and addressing gaps in education among…

Consensus is growing that high-quality early education is a critical support to all subsequent learning. In early childhood education quality is generally considered holistically in terms of the physical environment, programmatic structure (e.g., length of the school day), curriculum and instruction, and the nature of interactions between teachers…

In March 2020, institutions abruptly pivoted to remote instruction, sending students, faculty, and staff away from college campuses in response to COVID-19. In June 2020, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) launched a survey to capture a snapshot of assessment-related changes made during Spring 2020 in response to the…

While it is important to recognize the economic background of students and home factors contributing to their achievement, the purpose of this study was to discover what best practices schools were implementing with low socioeconomic students to narrow the achievement gap in communication arts (Darling-Hammond & Richardson, 2009; Gorski, 2013;…

The higher education accountability efforts of the past decade have placed pressures on universities to more rigorously evaluate the quality and outcomes of their programs while the emergence of new methodologies, from big data approaches to business analytics platforms, have also expanded ways of measuring the quality and return on investment of…

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career.…

The Psychology of Education Section 2017 Annual Conference was held in Edinburgh between October 27-28, 2017. Learning, teaching and assessment in education was the theme of the conference. The program offered two keynotes given by Professor Christine Merrell from Durham University and Professor Lisa Woolfson from University of Strathclyde and the…